Edward Snowden: The NSA Leaks and the Road to Exile
In June 2013, a 29-year-old contractor sat in a Hong Kong hotel room and handed journalists the biggest intelligence leak in American history. Then, instead of hiding, he put his face on camera and said his name.
Edward Snowden had spent years inside the CIA and the NSA, and he walked out of the agency's Hawaii operation with documents showing that it was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and tapping the servers of the biggest companies on the internet.
Thirteen years later he's a Russian citizen with two sons and 171,000 newsletter subscribers, charged under the Espionage Act and still arguing that he did the right thing. Whether you agree says a lot about how you think the world should work.
Edward Snowden at a Glance
- Born in North Carolina in 1983 and raised near the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, Snowden never finished high school and was discharged from the Army after injuring his legs in training.
- He joined the CIA in 2006 and worked in Geneva under diplomatic cover, then became an NSA contractor for Dell in Japan and Hawaii and, for a few weeks in 2013, for Booz Allen Hamilton.
- On May 20, 2013, he flew to Hong Kong with a cache of classified documents and met Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill.
- The Guardian's first story ran on June 5. He identified himself on June 9, and the US charged him under the Espionage Act, unsealing the complaint on his 30th birthday.
- He landed in Moscow on June 23, spent more than a month stuck in the airport's transit zone and was granted temporary asylum on August 1.
- The reporting won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and Poitras's film Citizenfour won an Oscar. In 2015 Congress ended the bulk phone-records program.
- Snowden married Lindsay Mills in 2017, published Permanent Record in 2019 and lost a lawsuit that handed the US government more than $5 million of its proceeds.
- Russia granted him permanent residency in 2020 and citizenship in 2022. He remains in Moscow, writing and speaking by video link.
The Life of Edward Snowden
Snowden's Fort Meade Years
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His father was a Coast Guard officer, his mother a clerk at the federal court, and in the early 1990s the family moved to Maryland, into the orbit of Fort Meade and the National Security Agency.
A bout of mononucleosis cost him most of a year of high school. He never went back, picking up a GED instead and taking classes at Anne Arundel Community College while teaching himself computers.
In May 2004 he enlisted in the Army with the aim of joining the Special Forces. He injured his legs in training and was discharged that September, four months in.
Inside the Agencies
A security guard job at a University of Maryland facility with NSA ties got him a clearance. In 2006 he joined the CIA, and by 2007 he was in Geneva maintaining computer networks under diplomatic cover at the US mission to the United Nations.
He left the CIA in 2009 and went to work for Dell as a contractor managing NSA systems, first in Japan, then in Maryland and, from March 2012, in Hawaii, where he was lead technologist for the agency's information-sharing office. Investigators would later say he began copying documents around April 2012.
In March 2013 he switched to a job at Booz Allen Hamilton, another NSA contractor in Hawaii. He lasted about two months, long enough to collect what he needed.
Hong Kong
On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong. In a hotel room there he met Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian and the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who kept her camera running.
- Glenn Greenwald was in the hotel room. His book covers the first encrypted emails, the days in Hong Kong and the fight to publish, with chapters on what the documents actually showed.
On June 5 the Guardian published a secret court order forcing Verizon to hand the NSA the call records of millions of customers. The next day the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed PRISM, a program pulling data from Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies. More followed, day after day.
On June 9, at his own request, the Guardian published a video in which Snowden identified himself. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things," he said. The United States filed charges of theft of government property and two violations of the Espionage Act, unsealed on June 21, the day he turned 30.
Thirty-Nine Days at Sheremetyevo
Two days later Snowden boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, intending to continue to Latin America. His passport had been revoked, and he never made the connection.
He spent more than a month in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport while Russia weighed what to do with him and the US pressured every country that might take him. On August 1, 2013, Russia granted him temporary asylum for a year, and he disappeared into Moscow.
The documents kept coming. In April 2014 the Guardian and the Washington Post shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the reporting.
- Luke Harding's newsroom-side telling, from the first contact with Greenwald to the destruction of the Guardian's hard drives under GCHQ supervision. The Pulitzer-winning reporting, with the reporters in the frame.
Poitras's documentary Citizenfour, filmed partly in that Hong Kong hotel room, won the Academy Award in February 2015. That June, Congress ended the bulk collection of Americans' phone records with the USA Freedom Act, and in 2020 a federal appeals court ruled that the program Snowden exposed had been unlawful.
Life in Exile
Snowden built a strange new public life from Moscow. He addressed the TED conference in Vancouver in 2014 through a telepresence robot, spoke to universities and festivals by video and joined the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, serving as its president from 2016 to 2022.
Oliver Stone made a feature film about him in 2016. In 2017 he married Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend he'd left behind in Hawaii, in a Moscow courthouse.
Pardon talk flared and faded. President Obama said in 2016 that he couldn't pardon someone who hadn't submitted to US justice.
President Trump said in 2020 he'd "take a look," and his attorney general said he was vehemently opposed. Nothing changed.
Permanent Record
His memoir, Permanent Record, was published on September 17, 2019, and the Justice Department sued him the same day, arguing that he'd skipped the prepublication review his CIA and NSA agreements required. A federal judge agreed in December, and the government was awarded more than $5 million in book proceeds and speaking fees.
- Snowden's own account of Fort Meade, the CIA, the Hawaii tunnel and the decision to walk out with the documents. The Justice Department sued over it on publication day, and a federal judge later awarded the proceeds to the government.
Family life changed the calculus. His first son was born in Moscow in December 2020, two months after Russia granted him permanent residency, and a second followed. He and Mills applied for dual citizenship so the family could never be separated.
On September 26, 2022, seven months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin signed a decree making Snowden a Russian citizen, one of 72 names on the list. "After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our sons," he wrote. He took the oath that December.
Snowden Today
Snowden is 43 and still in Moscow. He writes a Substack called Continuing Ed with more than 171,000 subscribers, and he appears at conferences by video, warning about surveillance, artificial intelligence and the power of the platforms.
The charges in Virginia are still open. The question of a pardon has been put to three presidents, and the answer hasn't changed.
Edward Snowden: The Leak That Wouldn't End
Snowden's documents forced the first real public debate about mass surveillance, changed American law, pushed the tech industry toward encryption by default and made "metadata" a household word. They also put him in the hands of a government that surveils its own citizens far more freely than the one he exposed.
Hero, traitor or both, he's still living with the consequences of the decision he made in that hotel room at 29.
He once said he didn't want to live in a society that does these things. He got a different society instead.
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